NLP Training, Techniques & Products for learning NLP

NLP is often defined as an attitude and a methodology that leaves behind a trail of techniques.

Well, perhaps one of the most important things you can develop is a great attitude. With the economic uncertainty right now and the challenges countries everywhere have faced over the last few months, choosing your attitude and a rock solid set of supporting beliefs is one of the soundest investments in your future that you can make.

To help you along the way, here are some wonderful quotes on Attitude, from others who have been in the trenches ..

"Everything can be taken from a man but …the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." ~ Vicktor Frankl

"If your attitude is not right, then even if you are surrounded by good friends and the best facilities, you cannot be happy. This is why mental attitude is more important than external conditions. Despite this, it seems to me that many people are more concerned about their external conditions and neglect the inner attitude of mind. I suggest that we should pay more attention to our inner qualities."

~ The Dali Lama

If you don't get everything you want, think of the things you don't get that you don't want.  ~Oscar Wilde

If you don't like something change it; if you can't change it, change the way you think about it.  ~Mary Engelbreit

To everyone is given the key to heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.  ~Ancient Proverb

Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing.

~ Abraham Lincoln

Because your own strength is unequal to the task, do not assume that it is beyond the powers of man; but if anything is within the powers and province of man, believe that it is within your own compass also.

~ Marcus Aurelius

Making it Practical:

So what attitudes would help you right now? How can you make your life more of a rewarding experience or adventure? If you are facing hard times, how could you change your thinking to have faith and discover new resources?

Explore the possibilities and remember a change in attitude and experience can come from within (by changing your thinking) or outside, by choosing to focus on more of what supports you. In the end we each get to define our own reality, if reality doens't serve you .. change realities!

A common theme that I've been hearing of late is "How can I get really good at NLP?, I don't have any time to attend practice groups or there are none near me, what can I do?"

So really what people are asking is how can I get good at NLP, on autopilot? This is really a good question.

The Army have a good phrase, it goes "whatever you train to do, is what comes out the other end".  Simply put this means whatever you rehearse and practice over and over will be the output you achieve when you go to use it for real.

In reality you want to get your NLP skills where you can do them without needing to remember "what comes next?" etc, where they are some practiced you can do them on que without even thinking and just trust your unconscious mind will do a great job.

Regardless of what skill level you are at right now there are only a handful of things you need to do, in order to "automatically" get good. Here are

1. Set a clear goal for yourself. This may be as simple as getting twice as good as you are right now within six months. Keep it in sensory specific terms, so if your 'thing' is hypnosis, then you may decide that you can enduce a trance conversationally in 90 seconds etc. If it's change work, it might be that you can change a phobia in 5 minutes and change a more 'complex' problem within x number of sessions etc.

Whatever you decide it to be, just make sure you have a clear goal in mind. Even a broad goal as get twice as good, without a sensory based representation, will help get your brain tracking this as an important thing to do.

2. Drop the comparison and 'ego' attitude that is common in NLP

NLP seems to have a unique effect of attracting lots of people who it appears think it is all about being 'better, slicker or smarter' than the next person. You are improving your skills for YOURSELF, at your rate. If someone can do something that you can't yet, then cool, get curious and go figure it out (perhaps with their help). Just remember you are improving your skills for yourself .. and whatever outcome you hold important (which might include helping others). The bottom line is drop any arrogance or thinking you KNOW IT. This is one of the biggest blocks I commonly see that blocks people from getting what they want.

When you do this, you free yourself up to learn from everyone and don't trick your mind to thinking you have anything (at least until you can do it several different ways!).

3. Practice (And Practice Some More)

This is obvious, but uncommon! In order to get good at anything you need to practice. You could say you will practice 5 minutes or 50 minutes every day, but in most cases unless you are a displined kind of person this won't work. You have your life to lead and you're busy enough as it is … so then the solution is MAKE EVERYTHING YOU DO, THE OPPORTUNITY TO USE AND PRACTICE NLP.

Suddenly when you approach learning NLP from this way EVERYTHING becomes an opportunity to improve you skills. So if you are talking to a friend you might be listening from the dominant 'frame of reference' they are coming from or if you are out at dinner you become fascinated to hear different strategies and processes at work.

The other day I visited a friend who had just had her first baby and as she was showing me all the photo's of the delivery that had happened six weeks earlier, she said something caught my attention. While holding the photo of her newborn, she said: "Gee that's so STRANGE, that picture FEELS like it happened a YEAR ago".  Instantly I was curious to know more and asked her husband, how long it felt for him, for which he said "4-6 weeks". I am always very curious when I hear of natural contexts that cause perceptual distortions (this is  a good way to be as an NLPER). As I unpacked how my friend had created AND held this as her experience it became clear that both the sub-modality experience of the memory and how she was chunking time had played a bit impact of her ability to keep the memory that way. A useful strategy I thought ..

By the way, NLP isn't only done by NLPers, everyone demonstrates processes we can describe as NLP. Indeed as NLPers, because we have labels for some of these things we can see "goldfish" in the fish bowl when there isn't any.

The key to getting good at anything is practice and repetition. Think of the formula like this:

Practice -> Learn From The Feedback -> RePractice until you can do it automatically.

Everyone who excels at anything, even if they have a massive natural talent will have gone through a similar pattern. Dr. Bandler and many other masters of NLP wrote out every language pattern in the 'book' and wrote down new examples when they heard them and wrote out their own over and over until they could do that language pattern with ease.

4. Be Playful

When you begin to take a playful attitude to learning NLP you will find that mastering the Meta Model or the Milton model etc becomes much easier. And what you practice you get good at, and as and when challenges come up for how to penetrate the things you are learning, you find yourself naturally discovering NEW ways and more powerful ways to do cool things. And then one day you will come to the realisation "you actually are very good at this stuff".

5. Chunk It To The Right Size

Your brain learns very quickly. Quicker than you can imagine and it is constantly learning and 'updating the map' on a day by day basis. Yet one of the key nuggets of wisdom from learning to master NLP is to take it in the right chunk size. For now, let me say that everything in NLP is related in one way or another to everything else (there is a connection for example between meta-programme and sub-modalities and modal operators and anchors etc). But for now you will want to start by picking an area that you want to get good at such as say language patterns, anchoring or change work and then focus on getting highly skilled at that.

Then once you have the foundations down (by the way, have you ever thought what are the foundation skils of NLP?), you can go on to get highly skilled at the other areas. NLP Times already offers great products on some of these topic's and I'm developing new products with input from myself and several masters of the field that you will be hearing about in the coming months.

For now, make a commitment today to start putting NLP into your every day life.

As NLPers we know that the old phrase "stick's and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt them" is wildly inaccurate. Indeed words - can cause people to kill and we see on the news every day, words can cause people to go to war and words can certainly "hurt you" .. as I am sure you have known first hand.

Or can they? Language is a very interesting thing. Most people who don't study linguistics and indeed NLP will spend their entire life completely unaware of how trapped and restricted words can limit us from really communicating what is going on.

Words by themselves do not hurt you, nor do they cause wars, nor do they cause people to kill.

It is important that we correctly identify (as best as possible, or at least practical) what is going on when words SEEM to cause a specific response.

For example last year, there was a report on the news of a British woman (I believe) who was facing years in prison and possibly even death for 'letting school children in the Abu Dhabi (U.A.E) to name their teddy's Mohammed'. To many this seemed completely natural and right, to others it seemed to be a world gone mad. But was it really than any of our own "triggered responses?"

My view on it was, it was a very good case of hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people forgetting that a word is NOT the thing it represents. It was an example of a major semantic re-action on a mass scale, with potentially grave consequences for the teacher involved.

Semantics in linguistic terms refers to the study of meaning, and semantic reaction is the expression used to describe when someone has a strong reaction to a word. There are many everyday examples that people "react" to. For example "FREE offer", "Huge Discount", "Sex" "Love" and so on and so forth. These are examples of typically 'positive' emotional responses that the majority of people will have a response to.

Of course their are others that many people have a strong 'negative' reaction to, such as 'fuck', 'whore', 'x racial slur', "Terminal", "Your Completely Wrong", "Fat", "Sex", "Love", etc.

Sex and Love are in both example lists as these, like every other word, could be on either side of the 'positive'/'negative' equation - as I have seen with clients many time.

Why us this? Because it is the perceiver's mind-body map that activates the meaning a person feels. Some people will have no strong emotional reaction to the word whore but could feed very strongly negative about the Love. As you begin to track and test this out for yourself you can see similar examples everywhere.

One of the things that NLP (IMHO) is most about is creating freedom and giving people more choice to enhance their lives. But often times by the time you have come to learn NLP you have had years and years of unhelpful conditioning and "semantic responses" installed that many people forget and in most cases seem to be completely blind to the fact that they are 'wired' to respond to words that don't serve them. Are you?

Every human being I've ever meet has "hot buttons" or words that they will (or can) be made to respond to. If you are like most people you have your own words that "trigger a hot response" in you, and to you, your response to those phrases when you hear them is JUST as natural and RIGHT as to the people in the middle east who took grave offense to a schoolkid naming their Teddy Mohammed.

Yet one of the most FREEING things you can do and experience is when you truly get that NO word can have any 'negative' power over you (if you so want it), and you realise that the words you hear are NOT the things they represent.

When I help assist someone who has been stuck with a strong 'negative' semantic response that they HAD to respond to so that they now are no longer effected by it, they often tell me it is just like "a complete weight has come off my back and I am feel like I am free or can breath again'.

Making It Practical:

Test this out for yourself. Identify what are the top two "trigger words" that instantaneously "get you hot under the collar" and then use any one of the three NLP techniques below to break the bonds that you feel don't serve you.

You can:

• Collapse the negative anchor with a more powerful one and build a new belief system up that supports the new way of responding.

• Get playful and challenge yourself to reframe 100 ways of how it could mean something else and help your brain realise you can choose any of a hundred OTHER ways to respond. Then condition that in by using the swish pattern and have someone deliberately try to "trigger your button"

• Use the Meta-Model to challenge your internal dialogue around this phrase or word so that you re-map a new more enhancing meaning.

Whatever your choice, get leverage with yourself and then you can find very quickly and easily you can transform something that was a very limiting and unresourceful response.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming is widely regarded as the leading technology for
communication available today. It is no surprise then that we would find the
very best communicators have spent considerable time learning everything they
can from this field. Perhaps one of the skills most sought by any professional or
successful communicator is "How can I anchor an audience?"

If you have ever attended a NLP trainers training programs, then most likely you
were told, when you anchor an audience for one state, go over here to this spot
on the platform, and when you want to anchor an audience for another state then
go over to the opposite side of the platform … and so on and so forth.

When I first attended my NLP trainers Training many years ago I wondered, if
that is the way to anchor an audience then how come Dr. Bandler and other
top trainers simply sit on a chair and almost never walk around the stage to anchor?

Well when I understood the real story behind how anchoring works, I realized
that you NEVER NEED TO WALK AROUND A STAGE TO ANCHOR ANYONE.

There are only 3 things every expert communicator needs to do in order to anchor
an excel at anchoring an audience, and typically not taught on most trainings.

The reason behind that is for another time.

So let's review what you need to be able to do in order to anchor well in group
settings….

1. Start With The T.O.T.E

The T.O.T.E. framework, which stands for Test-Operate-Test-Exit is always present
when someone is really good at anchoring. This fundamental model of
NLP is designed to make sure you have a clear idea of what it is you are trying
to achieve and have clear criteria for when you know you have achieved it.

Most people struggle at anchoring in a group context because they have not got
a clear idea and strategy for what it is that they are going to anchor. So LONG before
you start walking around the platform looking to mark out "this is my happy state spot",
and this is my "confrontational state" spot etc. get clear on what you are trying to
achieve.

2. State Planning & Learning Your Content

The second thing you need to do is to plan out your states, or state planning as
it is known. This means before you get near a stage or a group
communication context you plan out what states would be useful for your listeners
to be in, in order to receive your communication and achieve your desired
goal or output (such as install a new worldview, learn a new strategy etc)

For example if you are a sales person and you are looking to have more customers
buy from you, well perhaps the states of "confidence, trust, desire" would be useful
states to elicit in your prospect. If you are a teacher, then the states of "alertness,
interest, curious" would be useful.

Whatever field you currently use NLP in, figure out AHEAD OF TIME, what states
would be most useful to have your listeners in.

Once you have figured that out, then make sure you fully know your content. This
means you can say what you are going to say in your sleep! It means that you know
your "line" so well, that you can FOCUS on the one to one or one to many
communication such that, you can notice and anchor the relevant state's when they
come up or you elicit them.

If you don't know your content really well, then you will most likely get in a "brain jam"
and be "up in your head" thinking about what has to come next and if you are setting
the anchor right … and so you will not be externally focused, watching for the perfect
time to place your anchor!

3.  Anchor and Test BEFORE moving on

Once you have done steps 1 and 2 above, now it is time to get into action and to
establish your first anchor. Always have a clear idea in your mind, before you talk,
what kind of anchor you plan on using. After you become highly skilled you won't
need to do this, but in the beginning this makes the whole process much easer.

Once you have elicited the state you want from your audience (whether that is
2 people or 2,000 people) then set your trigger for that anchor and then move
on to the next topic. Then after you have changed their state, fire off the anchor
and see if you got the response you had planned for. If you have, well done.

If you haven't then repeat the anchoring process and do it even better the
next time. Remember build the state first, then anchor.

Making it practical:

So the next time you want to anchor in a group context, remember to keep
these three rules of thumb in mind and you will find you too can anchor like the
experts and enjoy even greater success and reward.

Put this to the test, next time you are in a small group situation or in front
of a larger crowd intentionally decide to anchor the audience.

And if you would like to learn the secrets to mastering anchoring in all
sensory formats, then go check out 30 Days to Masterful Anchoring here.